A lesson of two halves!! We were deliberating whether to ride outside or inside due to the weather, and decided to go out as the weather in the yard didn’t seem too bad. Turns out the weather in the outdoor arena has its on little ecosystem and it was absolutely horrible! Even the ponies, who usually don’t care about the rain at all, we’re getting upset in the strong winds and driving rain, so we decided to pop into the indoor instead. About 10 minutes later once we’d finished warming up, the rain had stopped, so instead of spending the rest of the lesson in the cramped indoor, back out we went to continue the lesson outside! 🙈 Due to the in-out nature of the lesson, instead of working on a specific exercise we just decided to just work a bit more on getting the ponies to work more consistently in an outline without them getting distracted and going full giraffe every 30 seconds! Magic and I had a real breakthrough in this lesson regarding working correctly in a true outline. Magic will tuck in his head and look pretty if you ask him to, but it’s a whole other story getting him to actually use his whole body correctly rather than dragging himself along on the forehand, hollow through his back & not tracking up.
The main issue we’ve been having is basically just me being lazy and not asking him to work very hard, so he gets away with plodding around the school without using any of the right muscles - this lesson was an opportunity for me to work as hard as I could in keeping Magic concentrating for longer periods of time and asking him to create and use a bit more energy in each pace.
I was so happy when we managed that elusive feeling of a true floaty trot several times during the lesson, where the rein contact is soft & elastic, the horses back has lifted, their core & hind end have engaged and their back legs are striding through underneath. We even managed the same feeling very briefly in the canter, where suddenly we were travelling much more uphill in a far more powerful & engaged canter, which felt fab! Magic could only manage it for a few strides at a time, but it was more than we’ve managed before and it was such a fantastic feeling compared to our usual impression of an articulated lorry with no steering...!
Working this way is genuinely very hard for a horse like Magic, he’s built to jump/hunt and has a very long back which is quite weak, but hopefully by asking him to work a bit harder on the flat from now on, he’ll start to build up some more muscle in all the right places, which will benefit his jumping and overall strength too! We’ll make a dressage pony of him yet (and maybe even a dressage rider of me 😂).
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QOTD: Are your horses & ponies still in winter mode, or are they starting to feel the spicy spring air?!
Ponies/horses:
Magic - 15.3hh piebald gelding
Helmet Cam: GoPro Hero 6
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